Raya Cole is dedicated to wholistic, integrated permaculture design, social justice, and mentoring students. She is a student and teacher of traditional ways, as well as newer regenerative methods.
Raya is the coordinator and co-teacher of the Living Ecology internship program, which aids the work of Aranya Agricultural Alternatives, an effective development organization in India. She teaches permaculture consultancy to students, as they work with a poor village farmer in implementing a transformational farm design. Her work provides crucial examples of alternatives to GMO monocropping, and solutions to drought, dry wells, malnutrition and farmer suicides.
She was the Permaculture Design Coordinator for the site of the 2017 International Permaculture Convergence (IPC) in India, and taught in the Advanced Stream of the Water and Earthworks section of the IPC PDC, as well as at both the IPC Conference and Convergence.
Raya teaches PDC’s and advanced courses on permaculture topics, such as, rainwater harvesting earthworks, mapping to scale and landscape graphics. In 2019, she will be the co teacher of the School of Wholistic Permaculture’s 9 month long permaculture design course, in Grass Valley, CA.
Raya teaches at 4 Elements Earth Education, wilderness, primitive and nature awareness skills which are essential to observation, learning from ecological systems and living lightly on the land. She also teaches for Tinkergarten, an outdoor nature play organization that builds problem solving, creativity, collaboration skills.
She lives on a homestead in the Sierra Foothills, in community with other families, where she grows food for her family and herbs for her medicinal herbal product business, Simply Being Botanicals.
2018 Convergence Workshop: International Permaculture Relationships – Decolonizing the Western Mind, reflections and interactive discussion about IPC India 2017 & Herbal Use and Integration in Permaculture Design
